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When positioning mentoring as part of a knowledge management strategy, most organizations focus on how skill- and role-specific mentoring enables leaders and experts to pass on experiential knowledge to younger, less experienced colleagues. As I described in the first two articles of this three-part series, structured knowledge transfer is a key aspect of mentoring's value proposition and one of the biggest reasons why KM programs should incorporate mentoring into their suite of approaches. Mentoring can become an effective catalyst to break down silos, build boundary-spanning professional relationshipsand improve the quality of collaborative interaction enterprisewide.

Cognitive Scale launches cognitive cloud platform

Cognitive Scale has announced Insights Fabric, which the company describes as a portable, open, standards-based cognitive cloud platform that protects and accelerates a company’s existing investments in big data.

Setting the cognitive cloud platform apart, says Cognitive Scale, is its ability to securely source, process, integrate and extract insights from structured and unstructured data, often described as “dark data,” which includes information found in databases, devices, blogs, reviews, e-mails, social media, images and other unstructured data sources. Dark data contains highly valuable and relevant information and makes up more than 80 percent of data, says the company.

Cognitive Scale says it is able to understand the way humans think and speak, bringing together all relevant internal and external data sources to uncover patterns, answers and insight, infusing those data sources with intelligence to help businesses make sense of big data. Cognitive Scale reports its technology understands natural language and is able to reason and learn instantly; it continuously improves and gets smarter each time it’s used.

Cognitive Scale has introduced the first vertical industry clouds for the travel, healthcare, retail and financial services industries, optimized to deliver insights-as-a-service and accelerate the creation of cognitive applications in specific industries. Each industry cloud is power by a Cognitive Graph, which is Cognitive Scale’s next generation database that builds on the power of Insight Fabric.

The company explains Cognitive Graphs contain billions of data points and contextual facts and are constantly updated, representing expert knowledge from individuals and teams in terms of relationships between people, places and things using words, ideas, audio and images. The information in a Cognitive Graph comes from many sources such as public, private, social, and devices, and the insights are machine-generated. Cognitive Graphs are not just facts, but the context of facts, reports Cognitive Scale.